At any size company, leaders face the challenge of what to delegate and when.

Small business leaders have fewer choices. In fact, if your business is too small it’s probably just you. You’re wearing all the hats. From accounting to marketing to design to sales and even operations.

And while that sort of “do it all” attitude can help you keep costs low when you’re incubating your business plan and just starting to build revenue, trying to do it all for too long can stop you from growing at all.

Face it, you’re not good at everything.

Just because you can use Photoshop doesn’t mean you are a web designer or that you should be creating your own marketing literature.

It’s hard to tell a message that screams “we’re big enough to handle your business” when your marketing looks like it was created by a third grader.

The same is true for IT related tasks, strategy, legal advice, and light manufacturing.

You can’t do it all yourself and still grow. So ask for help.

Pay awesome people for their talents and time.

You can’t just beg, borrow, and steal your way to growth. You have to pay for it — time , effort, and money. You weren’t used to paying yourself when it was just you. But now you need to get used to paying other people.

Because quality people require money. That’s why they are “quality”. You can keep hiring yourself for free. But you probably won’t get quality.

Remember, you could always make more money. You can’t make more time. And if you face an opportunity that is prime for the taking right now, bootstrapping your plan is a path to failure.

You don’t have enough time to do it all yourself.

But if you grab the opportunity in front of you, you’ll have enough money to buy you more time.

As a leader, it’s easy to think that you can do everything better then those you have to assign tasks to. As a small business later, it’s easy to think you don’t have enough money to pay for people to help you, even though you know they could do things better than you.

Don’t let bootstrapping become the strategy that holds you back.

We all need help from amazing people.

If you aren’t willing to pay for help from those people, and maybe you aren’t ready to be amazing right now.